public service by america's cable television companies and brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. tonight on c-span3, a look at the trump administration's infrastructure proposals from the heritage foundation. and white house budget director nominee mulvaney testifies at a house confirmation committee. kevin brady talks about tax reform. the cato institute hosts a discussion about healthcare policy and alternatives to the affordable care act. policy analyst business at the heritage foundation discussed the trump administration proposals for infrastructure projects and their potential

impact on jobs and the economy. this is just over an hour. good afternoon. welcome to the heritage foundation in our douglas and sara allison auditorium. we welcome to those on our c-span.org for these occasions. we ask the courtesy that cell phones and other mobile devices have been silenced or turned off as we begin. for those watching online and here in house we remind everyone questions or comments can be sent at any time to speaker@heritage.org and post the program on the heritage home page for your future reference as well. leading our discussion today is michael sergeant research associate in our thomas a. rowe institute for economic policy studies an leads our efforts to

formulate free market policies and overseas and schexamines infrastructure around the country. he is a regular contributor to the daily signal and his commentary featured in the boston post, washington herald and fox news. please join me in welcoming michael. good afternoon. thanks for joining us at the heritage foundation. in terms of sheer lip service, both major candidates embraced major infrastructure proposals as a way to address crumbling roads and bridges as well as dilapidated airports in the words of the new president. both candidates also prosecuopp

spending for job creation. the new president is poised to author a 1 trilli$1 trillion infrastructure plan and the democrats are following with their own trillion proposal. although we see few specifics these issues will come to the forefront as campaign promises run up against reality. the question we must address haphazardly throwing money at pork barrel projects help an economy mired in debt and low employment or will it generate effective investments and truly worthwhile projects in a fisc fiscally responsible manner. joining me is a transportation policy analyst. we well chris edwards, director of tax policy studies at the cato institute and author of downsizing government.org, experts in state and tax issues and before joining kato was a

senior economist on the congressional joint economic acade subcommittee. he has testified before congress many times and has articles appearing in the "washington post" and many other major newspapers. >> also joining us is the president and ceo of the center for transportation a nonprofit think tank with a mission for improvine ining transportation and leadership. prior to joining eno he was with the brookings institute policy program. robert has worked on a variety of transportation issues, fu funding and finance and city and urban planning, a frequent sp k speaker to a variety of groups and regular contributor to newspapers and other media and testified before congressional committees. finally, mark skrif venner is a fellow where he focuses on transportation, land use and urban growth policy issues. these cloudy infrastructure investment and operation, transportation safety and

security, risk and regulation, privatization and public finance as well as emerging transportation technologies. he frequently advises policymakers at the federal, state and local levels. we'll start off with a conversation style panel. panelists should feel free to chime in. please avoid talk over each other as we've gotten tired of for the last two years. i'm sure we have heard enough to get started based on the proposals we have heard from the incoming president as well as congress. i'll jump right into it with a question for mark. you've written a good bit about the state of the nation's infrastructure assets. do you think it's a fair characterization to say they're really crumbling and if we don't spend a trillion they will

collapse and a major spending plan is the best way go forward or is there a better option? >> well, the problem is maybe not a problem, but that our infrastructure is not uniformly crumbling, you have problems in local areas and that's true. but as for federal aid highways we've seen the number of structurally deficient bridges steadily decline, pavement smoothness increase, and so when it comes to the federal side of things things really aren't necessarily looking that bad. we're going to have reconstruction needs for the interstate highway system, a lot of money over the next two decades. but really where our biggest problems lie are in the municipal realm. . you have transit systems with tens of billions of dollars in maintenance backlogs, an

crumbling municipal streets. the problem is talking about federal policy, our federal programs really are not well equipped to deal with these local issues. so i think one thing that folks at the federal level members of congress and the administration should look at is perhaps revisiting how we do federal aid, would that mean allowing more of these funds to be used for routine maintenance? that might be a good idea. president trump introduced a fix it first strategy, i know brooks has long talked about, when rob was still over there. we do have problems but it's important not to lose sight of the effect that many of these problems are local and the feds are not necessarily the best folks to address them. >> if i could chime in here, if you look at bridges for example there's about 600,000 bridges in the united states and federal highway administration says

about 60,000 or 10% are strur structurally deficient. politicians refer to 60,000 as if it's a huge catastrophe. as mark noted the share of structurally deficient bridges has fallen over the years. so as an economist, the way you want to look at this is, is what is the optimal number? it is not zero. to eliminate all of them it cost hundreds of billions of dollars, what you want is to get to the point where additional investment more than pays for itself in terms of creating additional benefits. the federal highway administration says that the 60,000 structurally deficient bridges are not at risk of

falling down, not unsafe, but they should be updated but you have to think about these in terms of optimals. i'll give you another example of this. the texas transportation institute says that traffic congestion costs americans about 1$150 billion a year in lost tie and productivity. that sounds like a lot of money. but the amount of congestion on the highways is not zero. we would have to spend trillions of dollars to get the amount of congestion on the nation's highways down to zero. maybe we should reduce it maybe we're at the optimal now i don't know, it's a complicated question that i think you have to look at both the engineering and the economics to get to the right answer. i think part of the solution here is the more we move infrastructure out of the government to the marketplace we can get actual marketplace feedback and responses to judge

which highways are the most in need of fixup and expansion and which aren't. the problem when the spending is in the government realm the money isn't allocated efficiently because the government doesn't work based on market based indicat indicators, it works on other factors such as formulas and pork barrel politics. >> and as mark mentioned a lot of these problems's nature. chris alluded to a lot of these problems are more local in nature and rob i know your organization has done a lot of work looking at what's going on at the federal level which only invests about a quarter in infrastructure expenditure, when you give us an idea of what's going on at the ground level? >> thanks for having me today. i think part of the problem is we don't really define infrastructure very well. we think about infrastructure, we think about roads and bridges

and transit. what most of us think about. it isn't really infrastructure, there's transportation and there's energy. telecommunicati telecommunications, water very much in the news and each governed and financed very difficultly and the role in each of the sectors is very different, freight rail the government has a heavy regulatory rail but doesn't provide funding, telecommunicati telecommunications, energy, very private. so there is a definitional problem we need to get sorted in this country because i think it's adding to a lot of confusion of what the federal government should be doing. but a lot of the excitement we have seen around the country particularly over the last ten years or so is what's happening outside the beltway from city states and metropolitan areas that aren't waiting around for the federal government to pass a trillion dollar or whatever bill they're doing their own things passing

their own gasoline taxes in some sta states. eight to 10 states, red states, blue states, going directly to the voters, consistently year after year we see 70% of these bat lot meas e measures passed, logs passed $120 billion, awful a lot of money by any measure. you need two-thirds of the vote in l.a. they got that. >> and that was a sales tax? >> sales tax increase. and that's a very popular method of raising transportation revenue in lots of place es. but the point is as we have this conversation on the national level and big proposals very ambitious far reaching for infrastructure on the national level city states and non-profit sectors their working with aren't waiting around and going out and doing it themselves.

>> absolutely. just on that, turning back to the national level, chris, you talked a bit about the market and how when you have these things decided kind of by the governments they aren't always the right incentives in place. and one of the trump plans we have seen among many different proposals at least the most talked about one would use tracks credits to provide private companies to invest in infrastructure. what areas, at least in transportation but kind of across the board, do you think are most ripe for privatization and do you think the trump plan with tax incentives is a good way to help investment in those areas? >> to build what robert says. by the way over the years i've learned a hell of a lot from robert and mark, over the years so build on that, you can see in trump this confusion of what is infrastructure, what is properly federal and state and local and

private. and the plan put together by two of his advisors last fall that would provided tax across for, i guess, private investment reflects that d sort of confusion, they were not specific in their plan were they talking about local infrastructure, private or federal? so we need to start at the beginning to figure out what is federal, what is the proper federal responsibility an what is state, local and private? one thing that has gone on we have seen a revolution around the world in many countries, dozens and dozens of our trading partners are moving more and more to private sector infrastructure. you can see this in highways in airports, sea ports. britain started figuring out you can get better allocation of capital to move infrastructure to the private sector.

you would get more efficient management to move it to the private sect or and you would get more efficient management in the private sector. one of the things with the government sector it's mispri mispriced, so we tend not to use congestion pricing on our highways, federal water infrastructure, subsidize the delivery of water, we price it too low, so there's environmental problems caused by that so by moving it to the private sector you get more efficient allocation of the investment dollars the allocations determined more by market demand. you get more efficient construction and more efficient management and operation over time. i think all the people on this panel have generally, you know, talked in favor of moving forward more in the private sector involvement and the new trump administration is

moving in that direction as well. i don't like his tax credit plan. currently municipal and government infrastructure is on the -- side. it's tax exempt and there's a problem that it favors government infrastructure over private infrastructure. for example all the airports in the country are government owned and part of the reason why they're government owned, when the governments issue debt to support airport expansion they can issue tax able debt. a private airport would have to issue taxable debt. so we already have a bias in favor of infrastructure. the trump administration will move more in that direction or distort the tax code by favoring equity as well as debt. i think we need to reduce the bias, in favor of government and create more of a level playing

field in the private sector. >> what chris said, it is biased in favor of government infrastructure, government financing with tax-exempt muni bonds. short of eliminating that tax exemption, one thing we could do is build on a tool that already exists private activity bonds currently capped at $15 billion, the obama administration to their credit proposed qualified public infrastructure bonds that would expand the eligibility of pass pabs basically, different asset classes that aren't currently covered. that's one way of eliminating the status of municipal bonds and level the playing field. and i think it's more realistic to expand on pabs, or qbibs, whatever the acronym we can come up with, in

the short run, to eliminate that tax bias. >> i agree with that, too. it's interesting even though we had this period where borrowing even from local and the muni market was free for the most part was so low, we didn't have that much borrowing when you would think that borrowing was so cheap, so something else is going on here. lot of places don't really know exactly what they want to do, so there's an inconsistency between this big message that infrastructure is falling apart. we need to do this reinvestment. very cheap debt for places to take advantage of and then a lack of investment. something is not right there. i'm not exactly sure what it is, i think part of the problem we haven't embraced what mark was talking about, the real need in this country is for the rehab and maintenance, it's not made to last in perpetuity, so since we

did a lot of building in the 50s, 60s and 70s, that's got to be an emphasis and maybe that's not the best thing do. maybe that's not such an attractive thing for state and local officials to issue debt to start to rehab even though that is the thing we should do the most. but to chris's point how do we make the playing field more level an i don't know it's going to take any wholesale changes, but like what virginia is starting to do is figure out what we want to do with this particular project. here is what we want to accomplish and then do a rigorous assessment and say, here is how much it is going to cost us and open it up and say someone is going to beat that and go ahead and do it and beat it. they did it for the big project on 66, either inside or outside. that's exactly what it did. the state knew what they wanted to get and how much it was going to cost. they opened it up and somebody came in and is doing it better.

so that's a great model. >> absolutely. i think this whole discussion has kind of centered around more on the financing side of things at least from what we have seen and i think there's general confusion about the difference between funding infrastructure and financing it. if you can talk about some of the different financing models we have already discussed a bit and how that difference from actually funding the infrastructure and maybe some recommendations you have in addressing both of those things for the new administration? the difference between funding and financing. >> yes. yeah, we get that very confused especially trying to engage in the private sector they're looking for different rates of return, they're looking for something different than the traditional public sector is looking for. i think for advice and recommendations we've got to get this definition sorted out and stop talking about infrastructure in the abstract.

role and different types of infrastructure. let's think about what the federal role is in these types of infrastructure. aviation is a major conversation about spinning off the air traffic control system to a nonprofit or some other kind of corporate entity. that's something we should be able to move on quickly in the new year, something a bunch of other industrialized countries have already done. that's something we could be able to address very, very quickly, that's something advice -something that would have enormous transformations. that's something we can start to work on very soon. then i think making these connections better between the different departments the different agencies something they did in the last administration i think we saw there was a lot more efficiency you can gain by joining up things. they focused on hud and paep and

transportation, starting to work together to get more bang for the buck. the interesting thing, given you can gain they focus on hud, epa, the interesting thing given secretary chao, on the labor side that was a big theme the campaign about using infrastructure to stimulate jobs, but 11% of american jobs are directly related to infrastructure, but the people directly working in infrastructure so if we're s

dollars, that comes through a very broad system, hospitals and schools would be involved is that really the best way to go about not only creating jobs but also kind of expanding now the federal role into those types of projects that we haven't traditionally associated with infrastructure. >> i think say if you start with the goal of creating jobs through infrastructure investment i think you're going about it the wrong way personally and i think most economist transportation economists would agree with me as well, look at the cost analysis. what the democratic proposal did, they emphasized the job figures as you said michael they expanded the definition of infrastructure to such a broad degree that its basically everything now.

schools and health care facilities are now lumped into that. but on the specific jobs figure the 15 million jobs over ten years how they got that was there was a 2011 council of economic advisors estimate that said for every billion dollars of highway and mass transit investment you would get 13,000 job years out of that. one job for one year. what they did is basically took that figure, applied it across all these different types of projects that were not included in the cea's i think overly optimistic estimate in the first place, and that was a different time, too, where the economy was at that point. for every million jobs they rounded up 200,000. and they ended up with

this figure that basically means nothing but makes for good social media means and posters at press conferences. so what the democrats did and what i fear the administration may do is just basically try to -- they're focused on this 1 trilli$1 tril figure, they're both focused on that. they may focus on this rubric and say that's infrastructure. i agree with chris, i think it will be a heavy lift in congress to go back and revisit surface transportation and things like that, things they would like to think of as being done with for several years, so yeah, i think it remains to be seen, but what we have seen so far none of the proposals are really serious. >> just about the jobs infrastructure jobs have always been connected. these figures are out touted ale

time. 70% are actually in -- i said to myself 70% of the jobs are actually in operation of people driving the bus or driving the truck or working logistics flying the airplane, there's a disconnect between the infrastructure spending them that we need and really where the jobs are on the ground. >> i'm going to chime in on the jobs issue to, whenever anyone invests the number of workers needed is the cost of the project. that is not the benefit. you look at infrastructure investment, the benefit is the long-term reduction. the increased mobilitity that americans enjoy. and the cost is all the workers they have to hire. if you want to maximize the cost of any infrastructure project,

you should try to minimize the number of jobs and minimize how long it takes, it is investment we want to a higher return off of investment and we want high benefits and we want to minimize the cost. >> what kind of undergirds this, whole discussion, the broad question of what should the real federal role be in infrastructure, when it comes to funding and regulatory as well and one of the recommendations i'd make to the new administration is take a hard look and put a definition out there of what they see as the actual federal ed role in a lot of these things because when i take a look at it, especially with the highway trust fund we see the constant expansion of that funding mechanism which was originally supposed to be a walled off funding mechanism to build the interstate highway system. so we can go down and if you could just say briefly what

would your advice be to the new administration? should they hammer down on a few things that the federal government should be especially involved in? should they expand the role of the government in infrastructure. what would your advice be briefly to the new administration? >> the federal government funds infrastructure two ways. directly funds it through the entities that are the owners of infrastructure, the army corps of engineers, the post office, the air traffic control systems, the direct spending on infrastructure, i think the new administration should come in and look at those activities that can be privatized or given back to state governments like with the air traffic control system. the second thing the federal government does is fund state and local infrastructure highways transit are the main ones. again, i think the new administration ought to look at ways of reducing the federal

role and aid. aid has a lot of negative effects. one of them is that all that aid that come with top down federal regulations whether labor regulations or environmental regulations which increases the costs of infrastructure unnecessarily. i think the trump administration should think about infrastructure. they should be looking to free the states to solve their own problems to give them nor flexibility. >> i think there are certainly some area whereas the federal government should lead where they have been absent or not focused or things that matter to the national economy, things like aviation, and freight, clearly the size and scope global areas of them really needs to be present. we need a stable funding program for things like freight. there are a lot of proposals out there for user fees and ways we can capitalize that.

air traffic control, i think we are losing our place in aviation right now. aviation is under threat right now. there's a lot of discussion about public transit not being a federal role, i think it clearly is, a lot of cities and metropolitan areas fundamentally rely on that to move people around. these are the economic engines, i don't think we should be wasting money on projects that don't make sense but i think an area we still need a federal role. but in addition to leading, empower places to innovate. there's a lot of places where the government needs to get out of the way like tolling the intersta interstates. it's a no-brainer. they were built for no reason and now cutting right through the middle of metros and main streets, if places want to put tolls on those, all kinds of experiments they should let them do that stuff, so a lot of

places to allow them to be creative. and then i think there's a big federal role when it come data and information and there's a lot of discussion about data and facts and all that kind of stuff. especially the things we talked about here today we all agree we need more rigorous benefit analyses, the -- the can't waste any money on projects that don't make sense. we absolutely have to make decisions on projects that make sense. the federal government does have a role, there's an amount of money they do to do data collection but we can do that throughout the country, spur these new reforms and start to do things mark was talking about, make the right decisions and based on true facts and rather than partisan politics. >> i think priority number one for congress and administration should be air traffic control reform bringing in unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system,

aviation safety, regulatory reform, all these things on the table right now very important for the reasons rob and chris laid out. broadly something that doesn't require a ton of extra money is the federal government, administration getting its house in order, something this administration has expressed interest in fundamental regulatory reform and i think that should be true at the department of transportation as well. one thing i saw pretty troubling to come out late in the last administration was change in rule called reciprocal switching for freight rail. freight rail, private, one of our american great economic success stories, is you had an industry at the end of the 1970s at death's door, bounced back and is now bo booming. what this -- for all the talk of additional infrastructure

investment for both parties, what this rule change has the potential to reduce incentive for private railroads to invest back into the network. so if we are looking to spur investment first do no harm where the tax payer is on the hook, we absolutely should not be putting up regulatory barriers to that. >> 100%. one of the things you just mentioned was drones. i think that one of the biggest challenges for this administration and most likely the next one as well is the huge technological advance in transportation, especially when it comes to unmanned aerial systems, unmanned vehicles. i think we are on the cusp of transformative shift. mark, what do you think this administration can do to help bring along that technology and also do so safely? >> so, one problem that we have over at the department of

transportation and this goes back to the george w. bush administration, is the obsession with technology, communications technology called dedicated short range communications. it's basically wifi for cars. the way it's envisioned right now, it would allow cars to send messages back and forth in some guy runs a red light you would get a chime or tactile feedback or something to let you to know to take action or maybe it just scares the hell out of you and you plow right into them. but fundamentally the way they're looking at it, what i see is an obsolete technology and they are really ignoring self-driving cars or drones too, particularly self-driving cars you have the potential to save thousands and thousands of lives per year. this connected vehicle technology even as it's rolled out as the current

administration envisions it, there's a proposed rule sitting at the highway traffic safety right now. but even if you assume the rosy pre-doisksz the federal government are true, we're not going to see any of the benefits for a decade and half. by then, we're likely to see private innovation in this self-driving car space already releasing this technology to consumers. you can combine these to have cooperative automated vehicles, things like that. fundamentally, you're having the private sector lead on automated technology, a superior technology and then you're basically having the federal government right now trying to mandate this obsolete and inferior technology. again, going back to what i said earlier, i think first do no harm. the federal government should get out of the way and should know its limitations. when it sees something the private sector is doing well it should at the very

least not stand in its way but perhaps encourage that rather than distort the marketplace. >> yeah, and rob has done a lot of work on autonomous vehicles, what do you think the change is going to result in? how do you think that's going to affect our transportation system when it comes to just the current way haitian and roads are laid out and also with mass transit too? >> i think a lot of people think they know, but it's really new. we know it's happening, we know it's happening. it's happening slowly and happening in some cities and metropolitan areas. i can tell you there's an insatiable demand from cities to learn from each other because they don't know what to do quite frankly, but i'm not exactly sure what the right anxious is -- what the right answer is, but i'm sure we don't want 50 different rules and regulations

around the country inconsistent with one another or don't support the growth of the industry or private investment in this case. so there's a disconnect between this conversation on avs and passenger vehicles and what's happening around freight and automated -- or at least augmented freight movement, level one and level two they call it. they're trying to test out things like tuning and stuff like that so you have one conversation around avs which is mostly positive and affirmative states are trying to compete with one another to be the home for these. then you have other states b banning it. so there's an inconsistency we have to get figured out. so the federal roles need to be revisited here. just because we have additional federal rules doesn't mean it's actually more burdensome, because in often cases it might be that we're trying to redu

reducealireduce ali atomized regulations around the country. >> as a broader point here, the government does two things, it funds and it regulates. when the government often will try to do everything and tries to do too much and doesn't do anything well. i think the trump administration and congress should focus more on getting out the federal government out of the funding side and focus on creating a broad based regulatory regime that can allow the private, state and local governments s ts to flourish. with air traffic control it funds and regulates the system and also safety. that's a problem. i think it would be much more efficient to take the operation of the air traffic control system out of the faa and other countries like britain an canada have done and leave the faa with general oversight and regulatory role.

that's a general pattern starting in the 80s that britain used to privatize a lot of infrastructure including air traffic control, electric utilities, water sewer utilities, passenger rail. the general idea has been to move the general operation of funding to the private sector and create a national regulatory agency that does broad overview so that the public sector and private sector can each perform what they're best at. >> i think on the funding issue another huge challenge i see coming down the pipe with all this technology progress as with self-driving cars as well as increased fuel efficiency seeing with automobiles is that the gas tax is starting to lose some of its viability. when it comes to funding infrastructure, i've seen recently mostly in regards to these new kind of $1 trillion ideas but also they have been more prominent in other areas as

well. alternative ideas of funding and some ideas have been tossed around include using proceeds from opening up federal lands to energy exploration to use to fund infrastructure, repatriation overseas income. when it comes to corporations as well as a carbon tax. clearly there are other ways to expand the user fee model of gas tax and other kinds of things. chris and mark and rob, you can all chime in here but where do you kind of see the how are we going to keep on funding our infrastructure with the gas tax on the way out? >> one issue on the table a number of years is we need a major corporate tax reform and looks like republicans and the trump administration are going

to go ahead and do that and there's been talk for years about using the 2 trilli$2 tril profit used offshore, we want that money to come back and be repatriate i think the committees in charge of tax reform in house and senate, generally if there's money that can be raised from corporate tax refo reform, repatriating these foreign profits, they want to use is for tax reform. i think that's a dead-end, i don't think that's a good idea. i think corporate tax reform ought to be corporate tax reform i don't like the connection of corporate tax reform with

infrastructure reform. >> i think chris is right that you can really do this the wrong way. you can use some of this repatriated money for an infrastructure program and just waste it. if you can figure out what the federal government should be doing, if there was some kind of economic objective and you nested infrastructure under that, the last administration came out right away and said we're going to double exports in five years to take advantage of rising global demand in asia lant tin america. it's a -- great to lay out then they should have nested that under that and to achieve this economic objective, it could be ports and freights and stuff like that. if you have that rationality of the infrastructure and whatever things you are trying to achieve people can see it better, more than build it and they will come sort of thing. we have to articulate that first

and then a national infrastructure agenda would be derivative of that. i agree it will be a challenge to say the least, any time soon. but you're right. the gas tax is losing its efficacy, there are a lot of other things proposed but in the meantime we've been supplementing the transportation trust fund with hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue for a long long time not through the stimulus but through gaps coming in and supplemented that basically with overseas debt. so we have to stop pretending that the program right now is a user fee-based program. part of it is, but a awful lot is coming from general funds, we may be shifting not entirely from general fund, just fund it like other areas of policy. maybe not the right way to do it

but that's the shift that's happening already. let's figure out what it will look like in the long-term. >> the user fee model of the highway trust fund is broken down, as rob said. but i think we should go back to basics and try to strengthen the user fee model particularly for transportation infrastructure. the 2015 highway bill, the fast act, authorized funds for states to look at alternative revenue connections mechani mechanisms, their euphemism for mileage based user fees. i think there's a number of state d.o.t.s right now working on these pilot projects. and should continue for reasons you laid out, michael, we're going to need to find a repla replacement for the gas tax as it eventually gets electrified. looking at a mileage-based user fee is a great place to go.

in the interim, we should start lifting these restrictions on states with their own interstate segme segments. particularly, that goes very nicely trying to figure out where we're going to raise the funds to do major real estate construction over the next 20 years. i think we're probably a couple decades off before we see mileage-based user fees spread across the nation as i would like to see it. in the meantime, we should work to strengthen the user pay user benefits relationship and one way to do that would be to lift some of these federal restrictions on statesing to. >> great. one more question before we move on to open up to the audience. what do you see as one really bright area for opportunity for the new administration to really make stride is in the right direction. i know it's a broad question. like i said with all these

technologies and advancement we're seeing, i think there can be some good room to make inroads in that area, if you have more thoughts. >> we talked about air traffic control a little bit. that is the biggest opportunity this year and i sure hope the new secretary of transportation embraces major reform we've seen in other countries. a related area is airports. all airports in the united states are owned by state and local governments. there's a revolution going on around the world privatizing airpo airports. half of all airports in europe now are private. many of the others have been corptized. in places like london and heathrow airport private, a publicly traded corporation and the major airport in paris owned by the government, but it's been corpora corporatized, moved off the government's balance sheet, not

subsidized and operates as a for profit corporation. that's the type of reform we should look to. in this country, trump and other politici politicians, vice president biden complained about lg airport sayi ining it's a third world airport. i don't know if that's true but some of the best airports in the world today are indeed private. this is a way ahead for the. for the trump administration there's a much that stand in the way to move ahead and privatization and those need to be looked. >> i agree with both of these. i would like to see larger shift continue which is moving from thinking about accessibility.

it gets to what chris was saying earlier we're measuring things, multibillion dollar assess. we are measuring how fast we're moving vehicles around. we're trying to connect people to job opportunity. if you think about transportation as a method of accessibility, you change everything about the project we choose. we're not just focused on simplest like levels of service, change traffic major release it hasn't worked. so let's try to start figuring outweigh to not to continue throw money was congestion relief, price system correctly, figure out how to do do, how do you make it work for taxpayers

and get more bang for the buck. >> top of my list is air-traffic control. canadian-style corporate model. a lot of what they could be doing, leveling the financing playing field is crucial. that would be critical to open up or not tax disadvantaged private investment but even if we're not go to fully private size airport, moving toward model, lifting the cap, erimt nating anti-head caps and let them make their own user fee decision without federal oversight. in addition to air-traffic

control reform ijts. >> thank you for the great conversation. open up to the audience. state your name and affiliation. start over here. >> thanks for a great panel. so my question is, there's been a lot of proposals from trump or people close to trump about that $1 trillion infrastructure. the question is if this was a discretionary program along the lines of metric in form of a formula programs, would that be acceptable. would that be something you would support? >> i say this in the context of we are reason overly political sized during the previous

administration we did support grants for transit in those managed lane and there was appropriate me tricks. are those appropriate? >> for the reasons you laid out, the devils in the details. dekrepgs promises work great when you have the -- i'm not particularly optimistic about discretionary programs. you know, the feds don't take the blame. it's states making bad decisions with those funds. so the voters are go to their state officials and make their voices heard. as a gem -- i would be open to it, but the devil's in the details.

>> as you measure it how you score it all of that stuff. i cannot imagine, trillion dollar program being managed about the federal government. even if you take 20% of that, it's such an great program. i can't imagine them having the ability to do that. i wonder if they can set something up where use that money and make sure that it's framed around the right metrics. the states are doing the thing we talked about here. right know there's no -- it's a mind objective. if the federal wants to gear it towards something else, you can layout broad direction. right now we don't know how the states are spending that federal money. we know how banks and private entity lend than we know how public entity like the states

are spending transportation dollars. maybe we can figure out a hybrid between that. evaluate and measure it. >> i'm not infavor of further federal spending. i think it's a negative on american infrastructure. i would reduce it. the only way trump can get to trillion dollar infrastructure investment goal is think about private sector investment. if you look at national income account data, it's greater than government infrastructure investment. if you add up utility investment, cell tower, it ads up to 2 and a half trillion dollar a year. all government infrastructure is about a 5th of that, $500 billion roughly.

big corporation are the biggest investors in infrastructure in the nation. by lowering the corp. tax rate you increase return. to oil companies building new refinery, verizon investing no cable, et cetera et cetera. that's way to get to trillion dollar investment increase returns, to corporations invest more. just to put a plug in, there's interesting study at ppi a think tank that focuses on tech issues. at who biggest investors and infrastructure are in the united states and they list the numbers and the numbers are staggering.

the largest is at&t which is increditible: >> i think we need to look and reform the existing programs we have. many of which -- earmarks in disguise. we need to reform existing programs. question over here. >> my question is about pam -- >> we have a microphone for you. >> you can hear now. i'm arlington transportation commission. and my question is concerns somebody you said about reducing regulation at federal level. i have concerns about that. in theory it sounds good, you're familiar with ft rules, alternative analysis, project

proposals sa forth. when you get project, i cite an example i'm familiar with -- many millions of dollars to help fund the program but fta because requirements helps to eliminate wasteful project and alternative analysis not been in place this project would have been approved this my opinion because you can go directionally from a quality bus service or no service to a streetcar or light rail project. i want to ask you about that. how do we deal with the issues of cities and county and me get money from federal government through fta and they want these unnecessary project, how do we

control for that at the same time trying to reduce regulations? >> so, i live in arlington, i'm familiar with the streetcar project. it was a huge boon dong l. i would -- i hear what you're saying. this case funds like fta blocked a bad project, the reason why arlington county wanted to go ahead with the project because they had federal funding. another example, arlington have a project to build bus shelters, there's an million dollar bus stop on columbia pipe they built which a big boon dong l. i think in a lot of case federal money disstorts -- it makes them

go for the project that is not worth the value. i think cutting the federal funding you get government making sensible decisions on transportation that federal funding has incentiveized too many states and cities to go for a rail systems when bus systems would have been more flexible and can served lower population better than rail system. so i think government funding or financing of state local infrastructure is distortionary in that way. >> there was a streetcar enthusiasm -- >> renaissance. >> we don't have to look find to kind streetcar project. but i think -- this isn't just

around transit. this -- a lot of the money that comes out federal government goes for all kind of wasteful project for highway particular. in think the theme we keep hearing from this conversation is the right one, that we have to get better at giving that we're facing fiscal and financial challenges, we do have needs we have to make sure money is being spent as best as we can throughout all area of transportation. it's going get us better financial and spur more innovation. we run out of money, it's time to start thinking. we have to make sure the money we spend is spent as best as we possibly can. >> back to your point, i'm for deregulating the transportation section. you're point is well taken. pro curement regulation that

ensure competitive bidding, are completely appropriate and should be strengthened. we have a really, really bad pro kurmt policy in this country. we are shofling done down to these really crony local officials who have sweetheart long-term contracts with the iron industry when there are competitors you can save up to 25% because there's no accountability and this money keeps flowing, and congress weaken the standard, state atom me, cement industry down in

louisiana and that gutted bidding pro curtment regulation. i'm for deregulation. but as long as we're spending this money, we should be make sure that it's been spent as wisely as possible. >> question over here. >> rob wood field, taxpayer alliance. we here in the washington here, metro system. metro rail is losing money hand over fist. we never established reserve fund for replacement of capital items, trains eelectrical system. it estimates it needs between 18

and $25 billion over the next ten years. and of course, they have wishes to expands the system. what roll role -- i believe this edwards had comparison, what role should the federal government take with respect to metro. they board meeting yesterday explained ridership in inauguration with women's rally they lose money on such events. so what role do you -- on 40% of the ridership of metro is federal workers what role in any do you see with federal support on the operation site what potential privatization do you see? >> there was article a wacouplef

weeks ago. hong kong is a highly dense population and make heavy rail. they privatize success system. it generates from low passenger charges all the money they need for operation and most of the money they need for capital investment in addition hong kong, the hong kong private system get a lot of deal from the metro system, which is somebody washington, d.c. should do as well. i don't know whether you can run the d.c. metro on subsidy, probably not. the hong kong company that manages that system have been

successful, they manage it around the world because people want to know about running metro system efficiently. the disaster in the system have been remarkable. when i moved to town a decades ago. it was gold standard of system and it's remarkable how poorly it works these days. they have not done the maintainence is remarkable. i think that we should look into private management for metro. the problem is the complex government of it. three local jurisdiction it's going to make reform hard but i think we should look to that private management even if we continue to subsidize. >> when we think about met troe, we think about the subway

system. there's a huge burden on met troe, which are famously big burden for agencies, it's a big problem they are trying to deal with it. as it gets ageing of the population gets severe, they have to provide these services, this is so your point earlier about whether private technology firms can come in, uber, lift, others, public agencies are contracting out to see if he can run demand services much better, the uber ride is subsidized. there's been test. it's going well. you can imagine, that could be

something we could experience with this region. we are doing awful lot in this region when it comes to technology and innovation, working in private and government areas. >> we are running outs of time. one more question, please. over here. >> thank you for an excellent presentation. i'm a private citizen and an investor in some of these technologies. the fra guilty of the electric grid is talked about is this situation both possiblily an end

of civilization implication, standing from the government as well funding, maybe in order to make it happen. any reflections on that subject? >> our energy experts have within a lot about this and i think there was tremendous opportunity with the new administration to look at some more free market reforms to the energy sector, we are seeing pipe lines that are hinder inned haas administration starting to move forward. when it comes to the electric grid that's not my area of exper ties. >> all right.

thank you, so much for joining us. join my in giving my panel a hand. we had an excellent conversation. there will be some sandwiches outside. stick around to ask questions you may have left over. thank you. c-span journal live with issues that impact you. pots will join us u.s. british

relation. lawrence yuan chief committeeist talks about the current housing market. suspicious of a plan cut in mortgage premiums. washington monthly with senior writer kim what impacts it's having on communities. be sure to watch live saturday, eastern join the discussion. congressman mick mulvaney president trump nominee. he answered questions about voting record and positions on spending the military budget, and entightment, this hearing is two and a half hours.